Building Digital Culture
Daniel Rowles and Thomas Brown · 2017
Digital transformation is a culture change before it's a technology change.
What it’s about
A practical guide to digital transformation and the change management behind it. The authors’ argument is that most transformations fail on culture rather than technology. The book covers what a digital culture looks like, how leadership, agility, skills and technology have to move together, and how to manage the change in an organisation that’s used to working another way.
What I learned
Culture beats strategy. A good digital strategy dropped into an organisation without the culture to carry it stalls. People keep working the old way with new tools.
It all moves together, or not at all. Leadership, agility, skills and technology have to change in step. Buying technology without building skills, or demanding agility without changing leadership habits, produces friction rather than transformation.
Use data to understand users, not just to report on them. Dashboards for the board are not the same as data that changes product decisions.
Change is a habit problem. Transformation happens in what people do every day, so that’s where you have to work.
What I applied
A mentor and I chose this book for a session on what it means to become a strategic technologist: someone who thinks about how technology changes an organisation, not only about how to build it. The idea that digital value is a mindset shift, often across a whole enterprise, rather than just a technology project, is the one I took away.
Looking back, it explained my first job. At Elanco I was part of a global digital team modernising dozens of web sites, including a CMS migration with developers across several locations. The technical work was manageable; the harder part was getting teams to work with content, standards and tooling in a new way.
It still shapes how I pitch change today: start with habits and people, make the good habit the easy path, then bring in tools. I wrote that up as Digital Culture Is Built from Habits.
Where it connects
Digital Culture Is Built from Habits · Communicating with Stakeholders · Golden Paths · Users Not Customers · Ready Player One and Ready Player Two
↩ Mentioned in (5)
Twenty-odd books across code, platforms, teams, trading and science fiction turn out to make the same five arguments. Here's the thread that connects them.
Case study: on my industrial placement at Elanco, and then remotely through my final year, I set web standards, built a self-service web accelerator, shared components across 80 sites, consolidated them into 3, then led the CMS migration through delivery.
book · Ernest Cline
Ready Player One and Ready Player TwoA treasure hunt through a virtual world, and a warning about living there.
book · Patrick Lencioni
The Five Dysfunctions of a TeamA leadership fable: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, each built on the one before.
book · Aaron Shapiro
Users Not CustomersIn digital businesses, the people who use your product matter more than the people who pay for it.